RSS advertising back from state of hibernation

Some good news for bloggers that have few visitors but many subscribers. RSS advertising is showing signs of slowly becoming a source of revenue. Gawker Media says it grew its revenue from RSS-driven traffic by 300 percent in Q1 2008. And RSS use is apparently growing worldwide. According to a global (29 countries) social media survey from Universal McCann in March, 34 percent said they had “ever” subscribed to an RSS feed, which is up from just 15 percent the previous year.

In the article on ClickZ, it was interesting to see how different RSS adoption is in different countries. Top users (had ever subscribed to an RSS feed) are blog readers in Russia (57 percent adoption), Brazil (55 percent) and China (54 percent), while Hungary is in the bottom among the surveyed countries with just 15 percent. [Via Uppkopplat]

Also, FeedBurner will start to include Adsense ads in RSS feeds starting next week. Bloggers already in their advertising programme will see a combination of the previously offered premium ads with AdSense ads filling up the remaining space.

“Starting next week, we’ll be rolling out AdSense for feeds to a small group of publishers, in anticipation of a full launch to all FeedBurner and AdSense publishers “coming soon”. If you start seeing “Ads by Google” on an ad in a feed somewhere, that’d be us.”